Prepare to Dice Edition

Month: January 2017

Well there was another session today! No fatalities… yet. The combat is technically still ongoing, so we’ll see about that next time. It was a good long session, and four players present. That’s nice too.

There was another session today. Only three players, but that works. One hadn’t been there since the first session, which meant a very weak character compared to the others. That went fine anyways. Hooray for flat power curves!

Here’s something I thought about a week ago: armor being effective against different damage types. This was on the subject of a Dark Souls-like tabletop RPG, and I was wondering if there was any good way to implement different damage and defense types in the game without it becoming too cluttered.

So, if you want to have different armors being good against different things, what then? Well, the first thing I thought of was not every armor having a defense score against every damage type. So only if the armor had a notable defense against a damage type would it gain a modifier there, to stop things removing 1 point of damage from 12 different things and then also reducing damage from a few other damage types by 9, 4, 13, and 2481. That works fine when the computer’s counting, but gets a bit messy when you have to keep track of which of the damage types is reduced by 13.7% because you’re wearing the witch’s top hat of doom.

I’m exaggerating, but there are obviously things that don’t work as well in tabletop games that they do in computer games. I was trying to come up with something that didn’t require you to track more than (1) what defenses the armor affects, (2) what the damage reduction is, and (3) possible special effects (as usual). So there’s a few ways to do that. First off, you could roll with D&D 5e style resistance to damage types (take half damage), or roll with one flat number for all damage types (either dependant on the armor or stats).

So well… that was a long way to say I might have had a (probably old) idea for armor. Yeah… that. Heh, this is barely a good filler post :p

I might elaborate or decide on things if/when I run my Dark Souls thing.

Well, would you look at that? It’s 2017. I will probably forget that for a few months, writing 2016 when prompted (as usual). That’s not the point, however. I just thought I’d write a few things for the new year.

First off, I’m going to try making a review, specifically of the Unframed – the Art of Improvisation for Game Masters book that I recieved as a christmas present. This might even be my next post here. I’ve read a third of it, and it’s quite interesting so far.

And then there’s my goal for 2017: actually publish a PDF on my blog (!) I’d like to finish something to the point where I can put it out on the web with a clean conciencse. We’ll see how it goes, and what actually gets posted here.

Except for that I will probably continue just like before. (Anticlimatic? Heh)